Talk:Alushta

I moved this page to "Alushta" from "Alushka" because I am 99.9% sure that this is the Crimean town meant. I spent a year living in Simferopol and have travelled often back and forth by trolleybus between Simferopol and the Black Sea coast, and never came across a town called "Alushka". The other option is "Alupka", which is another seaside town, but it doesn't really correspond to the geographical description given in the article and in the overal Crimea article. --Rachel Fleet

Was the name for the place in English or Ukranian? You may want to read the Wikitravel:Article naming conventions, where it suggests using the most common English name. I know a number of places in this part of the world have various spellings in English, depending on the year and source of information. -- Huttite 05:42, 4 Jan 2006 (EST)

A google search indicates that both Alushta and Alushka are in Ukraine. There are lots of references to Alushta. However, there are only a couple of references to Alushka being a place in Ukraine; most of the time it is a female name. Could these two names be refering to the same place, but with different spellings? -- Huttite 06:00, 4 Jan 2006 (EST)

"Alushka" is generally, as you point out, a female nickname. The town on the Black Sea coast, served by trolleybus, which is the first Black Sea stop on the way to Yalta from Simferopol, however, is called "Alushta." I have friends who live there and have spent many happy days there. To double-check there wasn't some historical factor I wasn't aware of, I googled in both English and Russian. My English google search only pulls up two references to a placename of "Alushka". (A mail-order bride's personal webpage, and does not even specify where in Ukraine this town is, and google's cache of the WikiTravel page.) My Russian google search of "Alushka Crimea" [Алушка Крым] found it in three sources: an article about Crimean travel that appears to have been reprinted over and over and over onto other sites, a classified ad for a hostel (cached by google; not active on own server), and a listing by a Russian of Ukrainian radio stations. I got a TOTAL of 26 hits for the search words "Alushka Crimea" in Russian. By contrast, my Russian google search of "Alushta Crimea" [Алушта Крым] got 240,000 hits, referring to the seaside resort town of Alushta.

I think it more likely a mistake on the part of the original page author. I know of no standard English spelling for the town. It has no historical significance to English-speakers and is unlikely to have its own English spelling convention (such as, for example, "Sebastopol" or "Balaclava" -- which are correctly transliterated from Russian as "Sevastopol'" and "Balaklava".) I have not gone so far as to research the Ukrainian names for the town, as the entire area is majority Russian-speaking (Crimea only became part of the Ukrainian SSR under Khrushchev) and the places are known accordingly. I might try later to find that out. In the meantime, here is a link to the official Alushta homepage: http://alushta.crimea.ua/ And a link to a tourism site: http://www.alushta.org/. The official homepage includes an historical account which lists historical names of the town. Alushka is not one of them. "Aluston", however, is one of the names listed, and is probably the precursor to the modern name. http://alushta.crimea.ua/history/index.php